shadows on the screen. Third, it is important when using materials such as images to determine and satisfy copyright or other use restrictions.
Animation Telling a Story A second, more complex application of multimedia is to integrate music with clay and stop motion animation or claymation, as I did when my band collaborated with fourth grade students from Abingdon Elementary, a Changing Education Through the Arts (CETA) program school in Arlington, VA. In this project, the fourth grade classroom teacher and the elementary school communication arts teacher worked with the fourth grade students to create a clay animation video with subtitles portraying the histori- cal events of the founding of Jamestown, Virginia. The animation project was designed to meet objectives in social studies, technology, visual arts, and language arts. Stu- dents worked in teams to create storyboards of particular scenes for their movie (e.g. Christopher Newport’s arrival, the starving time, etc.) by first researching the historical figures and events for Jamestown, then creating sculptures and backgrounds of characters from the time period. These sculptures were then filmed using the computer program, iStopMotion, which allowed the students to create stop mo- tion and time-lapse animations, which in turn became part of the final video.
The completed animation video was paired with 1607—The Dream Comes Alive, composed by James L. Hosay avail- able on the US Air Force Heritage of America Band CD, Heritage to Horizons. The composition was commissioned by the Virginia Symphony as part of Virginia’s official celebration of the 400th Anniversary of the founding of Jamestown. The video was conceived separately by the students and was edited by the communication arts teacher to match the architecture of the piece.
In addition to the lighting and projection concerns de- scribed above, the biggest obstacle when using Claymation was the continuous nature of the movie. Since there were no pauses, unlike the use of PowerPoint, it was important to rehearse with the completed video many times so that both the conductor and the ensemble could maintain consistent tempi to match the on-screen action. Additionally, this project relied on several teachers to collaborate effectively by agreeing on the goals and timelines and the process of instructing the students across all four content areas.
A Multi-Media Concert A third way to incorporate media in your concerts is to use multimedia throughout the entire concert. This enables students as well as the audience to be immersed in a larger overarching theme, thus enabling a deeper understanding of a topic. In the summer and fall terms of 2011, the Northern
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Virginia Community College Music Department coordi- nated an arts integration concert involving the liberal arts division of the college and the community entitled “Un- derstanding our Past, Embracing our Future: Music of the Civil War in Modern Day.” The event included the faculty and students of the departments of Music, Communications Design, History, and Photography, as well as a local com- munity band and a children’s chorus.
The project commemorated Abraham Lincoln’s review of the newly formed “Army of the Potomac” in Bailey’s Crossroads in Fairfax, VA on November 20, 1861 after the defeat of the Union Army in the Battle of First Bull Run/ Manassas (Holien, 2011). Among the guests at the review was Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, who was inspired by this event to write the lyrics of the “Battle Hymn Republic” (Hall, 1916). The specific focus of the multimedia concert was to assist community college students, many of whom were first generation Americans, to develop and demonstrate their understanding of how nineteenth-century soldiers and their families used music to promote ideals and cope with the experiences of war. This was accomplished by having students identify and interpret musical and pictorial ex- amples from the time that defined the culture and life of the 1860s (Matthews, 2014).
Preparation for the concert required a great deal of planning and coordination. The steps included searching for poten- tial music, creating a theme, locating specific musical and visual materials, arranging the period music, collaborating with other musical groups, and integrating the multimedia in the rehearsal schedule. This concert incorporated a mix of modern published music as well as arrangements of Civil War brass band music for full band. It also included two commissioned pieces: a modern interpretation of Civil War tunes and a medley of children’s songs from the Civil War for band and children’s choir, arranged by Catholic Univer- sity of America faculty member, Jason Lovelace.
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